The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida

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СКАЧАТЬ once both gentle and violent, this logic reorientates friendship, deflecting it towards what it should have been – what it immemorially will have been. This logic calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or received hospitality; in short, it calls friendship back to the irreducible precedence of the other. To its consideration [pré-venance, thoughtfulness of and for that which ‘comes before’]. But is there more or less freedom in accepting the gift of the other? Is this reorientation of the gift that would submit friendship to the consideration of the other something other than alienation? And is this alienation without relation to the loss of identity, of responsibility, of freedom that is also translated by ‘madness’, this living madness which reverses, perverts or converts (good) sense, makes opposites slide into each other and ‘knows’ very well, in its own way, in what sense the best friends are the best enemies? Hence the worst.

      What concept of freedom – and of equality – are we talking about? And what are the political consequences and implications, notably with regard to democracy, of such a rupture in reciprocity – indeed, of such a divorce between two experiences of freedom that pride themselves on being respectively the hyperbole of the other?

      With regard to democracy and with regard to justice? For we would be tempted to match Nietzsche’s gesture, as we have just seen it in outline, to the call he seems to be making for another justice: the one soon to be within reach of the new philosophers – the arrivants – the one already within their reach, since these arrivants, who are still to come, are already coming: ‘But what is needful is a new justice (Sondem eine neue Gerechtigkeit tut not!)’,¹⁵ just as we lack – it is the same sentence, the same need, the same exigency – ‘new philosophers’. The anchor must be raised with you, philosophers of a new world (for there is more than one [car il y en a plus d’un]), in a search for a justice that would at last break with sheer equivalence, with the equivalence of right and vengeance, of justice as principle of equivalence (right) and the law of eye for eye, an equivalence between the just, the equitable (gerecht), and the revenged (geracht) that Nietzschean genealogy has relentlessly recalled as the profound motivation of morality and of right, of which we are the heirs. What would an equality then be, what would an equity be, which would no longer calculate this equivalence? Which would, quite simply, no longer calculate at all? And would carry itself beyond proportion, beyond appropriation, thereby exceeding all reappropriation of the proper?

      This ‘disappropriation’ [dépropriation] would undoubtedly beckon to this other ‘love’ whose true name, says Nietzsche in conclusion, whose ‘just name’ is friendship (Ihr rechter Name ist Freundschaft).¹⁶ This friendship is a species of love, but of a love more loving than love. All the names would have to change for the sake of coherence. Without being able to devote to it the careful reading it deserves, let us recall that this little two-page treatise on love denounces, in sum, the right to property. This property right is the claim [revendication] of love (at least, of what is thus named). The vindictive claim of this right can be deciphered throughout all the appropriative manoeuvres of the strategy which this ‘love’ deploys. It is the appropriating drive (Trieb) par excellence. ‘Love’ wants to possess. It wants the possessing. It is the possessing – cupidity itself (Habsucht); it always hopes for new property; and even the very Christian ‘love of one’s neighbour’ – charity, perhaps – would reveal only a new lust in this fundamental drive: ‘Our love of our neighbour – is it not a lust for new possessions? (Unsere Nächstenliebe – ist sie nicht ein drang nach neuem Eigentum?)’

      This question is doubly important. In contesting the Christian revolution of love as much as the Greek philosophical concept of friendship – and just as much the norms of justice that depend on them – its target is the very value of proximity, the neighbour’s proximity as the ruse of the proper and of appropriation. The gesture confirms the warning accompanying the discourse on ‘good friendship’: not to give in to proximity or identification, to the fusion or the permutation of you and me. But, rather to place, maintain or keep an infinite distance within ‘good friendship’. The very thing that love – that which is thus named, ‘love between the sexes’, egotism itself, jealousy which tends only towards possession (Besitzen) – is incapable of doing.

      Is this to say that friendship, rightly named, will carry itself beyond Eros? Beyond Eros in general? Or beyond love between two sexes?

      Nietzsche does not unfold these questions in this form. But let us not conceal their radicality, which can become disquieting, particularly given the motive of the ‘new’ or of the ‘future’ that we perhaps too often trust as if it were univocal, simply opposed to the form of repetition and the work of the arch-ancient. For Nietzsche sees this drive of appropriation, this form always pushing for ‘new property’, at work everywhere, including where love loves in view of knowledge, of truth, of the novelty of the new, of all new reality in general: ‘Our love of our neighbour – is it not a lust for new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any lust for what is new? (und uberhaupt all jener Drang nach Neuigkeiten?)’

      If ‘new’ always means, again and again, once again, anew, the appropriative drive, the repetition of the same drive to appropriate the other for oneself, the truth, being, the event, etc., what can still take place anew? Anew? What remains to come? And what will become of our just impatience to see the new coming, the new thoughts, the new thinkers, new justice, the revolution or the messianic interruption? Yet another ruse? Once again the desire of appropriation?

      Yes. Yes, perhaps.

      And you must be coherent with this response. You must acquiesce to this principle of ruin at the heart of the most utterly new. It could never be eluded or denied.

      And yet. At the heart of this acquiescence, just when a yes could be proffered to the principle of ruin, beyond knowledge and truth, precisely, an empty place would be left – left by Nietzsche as we would perhaps like to read him: a place open for that which can perhaps still take place – by chance. Favourable to friendship and like friendship, the friendship that would then deserve its just name. More precisely, favourable to the love whose just name would be friendship.

      Because the adequation between the concept, the name, and the event could never be assured. Its appropriateness [jusresse] would not be regulated by the necessity of any knowledge. Perhaps, one day, here or there, who knows, something may happen between two people in love, who would love each other lovingly (is this still the right word?) in such a way that friendship, just once, perhaps, for the first time (another perhaps), once and only once, therefore for the first and last time (perhaps, perhaps), will become the correct name, the right and just name for that which would then have taken place, the condition being that it take place between two, ‘two people’, as Nietzsche specifies. But how can you adjust a name to what could take place only once, perhaps, for the first and last time? In other words – and in a much more general way this time – how can you name an event? For this love that would take place only once would be the only possible event: as an impossible event. Even if the right name for this unique love were to be found, how would you convince everyone else of its appropriateness? And what about the task of convincing the partner, at the moment of the act in which this love would essentially consist, that of giving him or her the name?

      There would be no better way of honouring this chance than by quoting Nietzsche: Was alles Liebe gennant wird. But let us not quote him without underscoring in advance a point of logic, rhetoric – or onomastics: what might, then, very well happen, by chance, between two, between two in love, would cause no ripple in the calm waters of semantics. There would be no substituting or opposing: of one concept for another, one name for another, a friendship for a non-friendship, a friendship for an enmity, or a friendship for love. No, the ‘new’ that will perhaps come will be radically new – who knows? – but it might also take on the form of a development СКАЧАТЬ